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Hello Professor and Classmates, 

The work of art that I chose for this week’s discussion was Stonehenge. I've always been intrigued by Stonehenge because it just amazes me how they were able to stand these massive stones up and then stack the equally large blocks above it, called a capstone. I have tried to rationalize this by thinking of ways it would be possible, such as using nearby ledges and hills. But there was not any. Stonehenge is in the middle of a field with nothing around it, no trees, no hills, and nothing.  The design is also very precise when you consider the effort that had to be involved to place the stones.

In a lot of ways, I think technology has made us lazy and unable to think outside the box when it comes to these manual labor kinds of tasks. We rely on technology to do just about everything. The time involved to place the stones is an amazing feat. According to our book, Stonehenge took over 1000 years to set up (2750 to 1500 BCE), with 600 years to get the majority of the structures in place (Sayre, 2013). That is generations of effort and planning and coordination. I could not imagine working on a construction project throughout my whole life to pass it down to my kid, and my kid’s kid, and so on.

One of the most interesting theories was one that believes that Stonehenge is a physical representation of life, to be more specific, birth. The article uses illustrations that they want you to believe prove that the position represents the labia minora by the inner circle of trilithons, and the geometric center as the birth canal (Bailey, 2003). It feels pretty far-fetched, but so do the majority of the theories that are published. This article interested me because it was written for the U.S. National Library of Medicine. It is a resource I use for a lot of my papers and I didn’t really expect to find anything there about this topic.

I think that the mystery surrounding its origin is what makes it so spectacular. People are just naturally mesmerized by the things they don’t understand. Not knowing why, or even how they came about is part of the art. People will continue to want to see one of the true marvels of the world just to be a part of the wonder.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to reading the other discussions also. Have a great week.

Laura

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